Tell Me I Got Here at the Right Time
by ariel2me
Summary: Stannis, Robert, Shipbreaker Bay, Windproud. Based on this bit in A Clash of Kings: The storm came suddenly, howling, and Shipbreaker Bay proved the truth of its name. The lord's two-masted galley Windproud broke up within sight of his castle. From its parapets his two eldest sons had watched as their father's ship was smashed against the rocks and swallowed by the waters.


It was the silence he remembered the most. They had neither of them said a word, the entire time, from the moment they spotted Windproud entering the bay, to the moment Maester Cressen and great uncle Harbert forced them to come inside. Robert had resisted, but with motions rather than words. Stannis had done neither. He had allowed Maester Cressen to take his hand and lead him inside the castle, quietly and without putting up any resistance.

He had regretted it later. _I should have stayed, and watched everything until the end. Until the last man or woman had been thrown overboard. Until the last piece of wood that used to make up Windproud had sunk into the bottom of the sea._ He vowed to never turn back that easily ever again.

_Did we know what was about to happen, when we came out to the parapet?_ He could not remember. Robert had wanted to wait down at the bay for the ship to dock, but Stannis had told him that it was a foolish idea. _Mother and father will worry if they see us outside in the rain._

He remembered that Robert had scoffed. "Don't be such a baby, Stannis. A little rain won't hurt us. Besides, mother and father will be happy to see how excited we are that they have returned. It won't hurt you to at least _pretend_ to be excited."

"Renly will run after us if he sees us going outside. You know he will."

Robert had let out another one of his long-suffering sighs. The one he had been using constantly ever since their parents left for the trip to find a bride for Prince Rhaegar. His "it's hard to be the man in charge" sigh._You're not really in charge. Uncle Harbert is the castellan_. _He's the one doing everything that really mattered_, Stannis had thought at the time.

Stannis had also thought it a strange thing, the task the King had commanded his parents to undertake. Why couldn't Prince Rhaegar marry someone from the Seven Kingdoms, instead of looking for a bride from across the sea? After all, Targaryens usually wed brothers and sisters, and that is even closer than marrying the daughter of one of the lords in the kingdom.

He had asked the question during a feast the night before his parents had set sail. It had been met with awkward and uncomfortable silence, except from his mother, who had laughed, but immediately covered her mouth with her hand. No one had noticed except Stannis.

She came to his room late that night, when he was already half asleep.

"You mustn't say things like that in front of others."

"But you were thinking it too. You laughed. I saw you."

She seemed poised between impatience and amusement. This time, amusement won out. She smiled.

"Well, it will be our little secret. But we have talked about this before."

"But father said to always tell the truth."

Impatience won _this_ time. "It's not that simple."

He waited for her to continue.

"Never mind, it can wait. I have to say goodbye to Robert and Renly too."

He had spent most of his adult life wondering what else his mother had wanted to tell him. That had been another grief on top of the grief of lost - that he had not known her well enough to know what it was she would have told him, if only she had came back.

It was raining the day their parents were supposed to return home. It started as a light drizzle just before dawn, turning into a heavier rain by the time they were eating breakfast. Renly had been afraid of the sound of the thunders, he suddenly remembered. But none of them had thought that a great storm was coming.

_Why didn't we?_ He wondered now. The thunders had boomed loud enough, the wind had swayed and shaken the trees so hard, some of the branches had been snapped off. To his eternal shame, his main thought that morning had been an almost gleeful satisfaction, that one of the branches broken by the wind was the one Proudwing had flown into, the first time he took her hawking. The exact tree and the exact branch had been etched into his memory by the sound of Robert's laughter and the snickering from a few of the knights.

The storm that would kill his parents were building up strength, and he had been wasting his time thinking about an old slight, an old grievance towards something not even flesh and blood. _I should have been praying to the Seven for their safe return instead_, he had thought, the day his parents' bodies were finally washed ashore.

That thought had lasted for less than a day. By nighttime, he was so full of rage and anger and wrath he thought of running through the castle screaming and breaking everything. But what would that have accomplished?

_I did pray. I started praying the minute Robert and I saw the storm across the horizon, as we stood silently on the parapet. And I didn't stop until they laid out the bodies inside the sept. Where were the gods then? _

And yet, through the distance of time and age and blunted grief, he finally saw that it was not the gods he was angriest at. He hated himself the most, for his own naivety, for believing that the gods were rational creatures, bounded by rules and laws, and most of all, order. They were not, and he should have known it.


End file.
